CIARS

The Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies

Research and teaching in the areas of equity, anti-racism praxis and alternative knowledges in education.

CIARS was established in the 1996-97 session, bringing together faculty and students whose research interests and political commitments are in anti-racism. The Centre provides a supportive research environment, linking communities of colour, marginalized communities, and the university.

The mandate of CIARS, namely the fostering of interdisciplinary anti-racism studies in education, embraces a broad view of education. In CIARS' view, education is defined as those processes that influence and contribute to how individuals and their communities come to know the world and act within it.

CIARS' faculty and students working in the field of anti-racism are deeply committed to an integrative view: all systems of oppression are interlocked and a study of one such system, racism, necessarily entails a study of class exploitation, sexism, ableism and heterosexism.

Recent research by associated faculty includes work on schooling and education, for example, research on inclusive schooling practices, and drawing from resources of the home, family and community in improving youth educational activities. In addition, CIARS' core faculty interests include research on the judicial system, immigration, unions, community development, community-state relations and globalization and its effects on communities of colour.

Events

UPCOMING EVENTS

CIARS is pleased to announce that it is holding its X1 Decolonizing Conference for critical dialogues on the theme of “Dialoguing and Living Well Together: Decolonization and Insurgent Voices”. Using a Decolonizing perspective, the conference hopes to explore new meanings of “living well together” outside of White mythology (in Derrida’s terms) and the capitalist paradigm. We ask: how do we bring non-Western epistemologies to a terrain that has existed through a long-exercised White Mythology? What Indigenousexperiences speak to the possibility of living well together in new futures? What additional dimensions of the above can be gleaned from the constant mobility of bodies, identities, subjectivities and relations?